C86, a compilation tape released in 1986 by NME (then a more leftfield, not to mention left-leaning, paper than the meretricious publication we see today) ended up giving a name to a whole genre of shambolic, wet jangle-pop and influencing everything from Sarah Records to Belle & Sebastian to commercial alternative music, is now online in downloadable MP3 form. I can recommend Primal Scream's Velocity Girl, The Bodines' Therese, the Shop Assistants' It's Up To You and the surreal head trip that is Stump's Buffalo. The Half Man Half Biscuit track isn't bad either, though, not having grown up in England in the 1980s, I don't get the references. Actually, you may as well get the whole lot and make up your own mind.

As someone pointed out in the comments, it's about time someone put up the preceding NME cassette, C81, which features significant post-punk/new-pop artists such as Pere Ubu, Orange Juice, Aztec Camera, Cabaret Voltaire and the Buzzcocks.

And what is today's answer to C81 and C86? Well, don't look to anything quite so groundbreaking NME for it; the closest they'd give you would be things like NME Britpack, with the latest watered-down, sharp-suited Gang Of Four/Duran Duran copyists, tediously derivative retro-rockists like Razorlight and Yourcodenameis:Milo and, of course, Dionysiac Genius of Rock, Pete Doherty.

Posted by: datakid | http:// | Fri Jul 29 07:41:59 2005

can someone who got the mp3s wrap them up and bittorrent them? cheers

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Fri Jul 29 11:00:13 2005

Well, I found my copy on SoulSeek ages ago, so you may have luck there.

Btw, in addition to the Windows client and Python/X11/Gtk client, there's now apparently a MacOS X client: http://chris.schleifer.net/ssX/

Posted by: steff | http://ofterdingenandkropotkin.blogspot.com | Sat Jul 30 02:41:53 2005

Yes, the Bodines. Excellent. Been searching hi and lo for their stuff.

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Mon Aug 1 12:54:23 2005

See if you can find their album Played, or at least the track "Heard It All".

One of these days I'm going to make a "songs that sound like New Order but aren't" compilation, and that will be on it.

Posted by: Graham | http://grudnuk.com/ | Tue Aug 2 13:47:28 2005

And a companion volume called "songs that sound like Joy Division and aren't"?

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